Report: Democracy out, cyber in

Promoting democracy takes a back seat in a new Obama administration intelligence strategy released Tuesday, while combating cyber-attacks and tracking threats across international borders become the new and more urgent priorities for America’s spies.

The National Intelligence Strategy, 18 pages in its unclassified version, also puts greater emphasis on what Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair called the “international environment” and emerging, long-term dangers to U.S. security.

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“For long years after the Cold War ended, we were in a post-Cold War world. For years after 9/11 ended, we were in a post-9/11 world. It seemed like we were always looking backwards and being run by the past,” Blair said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning. “If you look at this document, I think for the first time we have a good understanding of the sort of world that we’re in—the complexity and the dynamic nature of the world.”

Blair said the blueprint is vital for focusing the efforts of 16 federal agencies that play a part in intelligence collection and analysis.

“It’s a big deal for us in the intelligence community,” Blair said. “It’s a muscular intelligence response to the nation’s responsibilities so that we can provide good advice to the policymakers and in the field.”

The Bush administration’s last National Intelligence Strategy, issued in 2005, gave prominent play to democracy promotion, which was a key theme of Bush’s inaugural address that year. The third of five Bush-era mission objectives was titled: “Bolster the growth of democracy and sustain peaceful democratic states.” In addition, “promoting the growth of freedom and democracy” was explicitly part of the leading goal of the intelligence community, namely counterterrorism.

That language was stripped from the new report, but a senior intelligence official suggested the Obama Administration views democracy more as a goal than as a means of achieving a goal.

“We looked at and thought about that a lot,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We really see that as an underlying outcome to implementing the strategy. It is not a diminution of interest or focus on democratization but rather shifting it to an outcome.”